The past Sunday we had the pleasure to witness two of the best teams in the world and top contenders for the Fall Major in an epic best of 5 clash. The real thrill for us were a couple of strategic and tactical surprises we want to share with you.

Three days into the main event we already have a large enough number of games to do some meaningful win rate analysis for the pro’s favorite heroes. Nonetheless, keep in mind that the number of games is still relatively low and the randomness is surely not totally eliminated from the picture.

Our anticipation was that the grand finals would be between the two teams that perfected those two play styles - seemingly Secret and LGD. Yet, during the first day in Key Arena teams displayed great versatility.

The fight for upper bracket seeding continues and the meta starts to take shape. The bad part is that the most highly valued heroes appear in every game: all 10 most popular heroes have a pick & ban rate above 70%. The interesting part is that there doesn’t seem to be a correlation between the popularity of a pick and its win rate.

More than half of the games during the first day of the group stage were a 1-1 draw – this speaks loads about the level of Dota in this tournament. All teams are good enough to take games off each other.